"Gentlemen--fellow-freemen of Virginia! The bulwarks of a nation's liberties are the virtues of her children. Compared with these, what is wealth? what is grandeur? what even are power and glory? These--riches and greatness, power and renown--are the possessions of the Old World; yet what have they availed her? Look around that ancient hemisphere, and tell me _where_ among its blood-stained battle-fields! _where_ under its polluted palaces! where in its haunts of the despot and the slave! you can find the love of liberty, the love of law, the love of order, the love of justice, that give permanence to the institutions they adorn, and, like the laurel crown of the Cesars, guard from the thunderbolt the temples they bind in the wreath of honour? Look for them in the Old World, but look in vain. The mighty Colossus of Christendom, once vital with virtue, lifts its decrepit bulk beyond the verge of the Atlantic, a vast and mournful monument of decay! Age and the shocks of the elements, the wash of the tempest and the lightning-stroke, have ploughed its marble forehead with wrinkles; mosses hang from its brows, and the dust of its own ruin--dust animated only by insects and reptiles, the offspring of corruption--moulders over its buried feet! The virtues that once distinguished--that almost deified--the immortal Colossus, have fled from the old, to find their home in the New World. I look for them only in the bosoms of Americans!" Here the orator, who had pronounced this sublime exordium with prodigious earnestness and effect, paused, while the welkin rung with the shouts of rapture its complimentary close was so well fitted to inspire. As for me, I felt a doleful skepticism as to the justness of the compliment, having the very best reason to distrust that love of liberty, law, order, and justice, which was about to consign me to ropes and flames, without asking the permission of a judge and jury. Moreover, I could not exactly see how Mr. Hampden Jones's remarks on the old and new world had any thing to do with the subject of abolition, which he had risen to discuss; and, indeed, this difficulty seemed to have beset others as well as myself, several crying out with great enthusiasm, "Let's have something on abolition; and then to the Lynching!" while others exclaimed, "Let's have the Lynching first, and the speech afterward."